Making my First libGDX Game

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Recently I decided to create a simple Android game and it was much easier than I thought it would be!
I had never made an Android game before but I had made a few Android apps as well as a JOGL game which is great as it meant I had a good idea of what was happening behind the scenes.

Game development frameworks like libGDX often make it easy to create games because they handle a lot of the low level work. libGDX is more or less a wrapper over OpenGL and allows you to make raw OpenGL API calls if you so desire. Even though libGDX is very simple to use, I would still recommend making a simple game with raw OpenGL to fully grasp what is happening behind the scenes.

Picking a game to make

The first step in making a game is deciding what you actually want to make. For my first game I thought I'd stick to something simple that other developers had made tutorials on. Turns out that Flappy Bird clones are the Hello World App's of the game development world. As I own a green cheek conure called Siavash it was only reasonable I made a clone called Flappy Siavash.

Brent Aureli's Tutorial

I'm not going to go through the actual game making process in this post.
I ended up following this tutorial by Brent Aureli up to around part 7 before I got a hang of things and started to finish off the game myself.

Features

My game ended up having the following features:

Main Menu Screen (very basic with a play button)
Custom sprite (coloured to match my bird Siavash)
Obstacle crash animation (rotating into nose dive into ground)
Obstacle crash screen flash
Using cages as the obstacle
Number of cages active at any given time can be changed
Fade in/Fade out for various text/sprites/etc
Pause menu to pause game
Game over menu with option to play again
High score functionality (using local storage)
Works and tested on Android, Java, Web
Uses custom distance field font with fragment/vertex shader
Scrolling backgrounds
Randomised obstacles
Endless mode

Gameplay

Tips

Here are some tips which may help you when creating your own libGDX game:

Make sure you dispose resources (textures etc) when you are done using them or you will have memory leaks.
Don't remake the same Texture etc all the time, store the Texture somewhere (in the class or put in in an asset manager and retrieve it whenever needed)
If possible, keep assets with widths/heights that are powers of 2. Assets seem to fail to load correctly with GWT (Google Web Toolkit) otherwise.
Organise assets in subfolders (shaders/images/sounds/sprites)! Don't dump everything into the same folder.
When updating your states, always use dt (delta time) to scale your changes appropriately.
Place sprites in your word using coords relative to the cameras viewport width/height.
Keep a helper class with various static methods useful for performing common tasks (do the same with a debug class for debugging).

Source Code

The code from my project is available on Github if you are interested:
https://github.com/mobeigi/Flappy-Siavash

Play Online

Play Online At:

https://mobeigi.dev/flappysiavash/

Play Store App

I decided to release this app to the Google Play Store to learn about the Play Store publishing process.

Available at:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mobeigi.flappysiavash

My Next Project

I am now working on a much more complicated/unique game which I plan to polish up.
This project will likely take much, much longer but I will also learn a lot along the way.